Resources for Researchers and PhD Students

Researchers can get overwhelmed by the volume of information that is easily reachable through the Internet. The problem is trying to maintain academic and scientific excellence and efficient working when faced with an information tsunami. Modern technology has brought us seemingly infinite information. Yet, we can use technology to filter, organise and efficiently work with that endless information. Hopefully, the resources listed in this article are useful to those performing academic, scientific, and industrial research, particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. The practical resources here have a UK bias due to the location of the author. To suggest additions to the lists which are updated occasionally send an email, dan@tekeye.uk

Magnifying Glass

Tip: For University researchers, do not forget to use the facilities provided by your academic institute, especially via the library. The University wants you to do well as it means they do well. Your academic institute or research organisation is normally very supportive with programs in place to help researchers, not only via the library, but it can include a Doctoral College and a dedicated research office.

List of Resources for Researchers

Information Retrieval - Where to Find Academic Papers

Google Scholar, provides the world's academic literature according to Google.
Semantic Scholar, originally covered computer science and neuroscience papers, but now covers most fields of science.
OpenAlex, "search and analyze the world's research".
CORE, states it is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers.
The Lens, connects patents, scholarly documents, technical literature and data in a searchable and annotated manner.
JSTOR, provides access to millions of articles, books, images, and primary sources
How to search on Google, the Refine web searches options can be useful.
Internet Archive, includes the WayBack Machine, see also time travel.
unglue.it, a free ebook service, 70,000+ ebooks, and maybe a way to publish your work.

Long-established engineering organisations have easy-to-search archives. Though membership of the organisation through your academic library or personal membership is usually required to read the articles or PDFs (though some are moving to Open Access), examples include:

IEEE Xplore Digital Library
ACM Digital Library - Plus, ACM have opened up their 1st 50 years of articles.
SAE MOBILUS - Articles and research on transportation.
IET Library

Here are some other sources for finding research papers and articles:

Scopus, citation searching
ScienceDirect, science, health and medical journals
Scilit, MDPI's platform for academic publications
Wiley Online Library
Taylor and Francis Online
PubMed
CiteSeerX
dblp, the computer science bibliography
PhilPapers, an index of research literature in philosophy, including an open access archive of other resources
Papers with Code, originally for Machine Learning resources, now expanding

If you require a subject or discipline-specific database, then Wikipedia has a list of academic databases and search engines.

Organising Tools

In-depth research requires discipline and organisation for efficient results, and reduced stress. Software tools can be a great help. Try a few tools to see which ones seem intuitive to use in your research work.

Mendeley references and datasets manager, online and computer client app.
Zotero is a free tool to help collect, organise, cite, and share research.
RefWorks references manager.
MyBib is a tool to help format a citation.
Open Science Framework is a free service to support research.
Tropy is a program that helps organise research images and photos.
VOSviewer is software that can be used to visualise bibliometric and other types of linked items and data.

There are web-based visualisation tools that can be very helpful. They allow you to enter a paper and produce a graph structure showing related papers, it may improve your efficiency when performing literature reviews. They also help you see how your papers have influenced other work:

Connected Papers

Connected Papers, graphing similarity between academic papers.
Inciteful, explore interconnections and impact insights for papers.
ResearchRabbit, tools to discover related work and paper interconnections.

Data Repositories

The need for open science is more than the publishing of a paper. Access to citable data sets is increasingly important as science addresses the need for reproducibility of results in published research. Further, data sets should be accessible for verification of results. Your institute may have a data share that can provide public links, alternatively, try these:

figshare citable data repository.
Zenodo citable storage for research outputs.
IEEE DataPort for referenceable data storage.
For publishing software developed as part of a research project try The Journal of Open Source Software.
Dryad is fee based. It is "an open data publishing platform and a community committed to the open availability and routine re-use of all research data". Deposited data is given a DOI.

Helpful Tools

gist, researching an ontology, start with a solid foundation. Semantic Arts gist is a base ontology for business concepts using the fewest number of primitives.
MathDeck, build and explore mathematical formulae. MathDeck is an online service to help understand and find mathematical formulae. You can compose a formula by hand or use LaTeX syntax to get help on a mathematical formula and symbols.
Open English WordNet, need data for language research, Open English WordNet is a useful resource. Other WordNets exist, e.g. Portuguese.

Writing Tools

The grind of writing can be helped with these tools.

Overleaf for online LaTeX editing, document creation and collaboration. There is a list of advantages to using LaTeX instead of a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, in this article about a thesis template.
Grammarly writing assistant does a lot more than a normal spelling and grammar checker.
Some publications work with Paperpal to automate paper checking before publication, for example, Paperpal Preflight for IEEE Access.

If you struggle to begin a new paper start by putting down section headers as a guide to organising your thoughts. Science and engineering papers can follow the IMRaD format (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) as a starter. However, high-quality scientific content matters, not religiously sticking to a particular format. Other ways exist to help organise what is going to be covered in a paper, e.g., a structured abstract that could follow OMRC (Objective, Methods, Results and Conclusion) or a variation of it.

There is the emergence of AI tools that can help speed up writing and provide a starting point for your work:

Perlego Research Assistant, Perlego is a subscription-based digital library. It's an AI tool that can produce summaries and answers from the library when you ask a question. Try it for free (from £96 per year).
Petal, organise and interact with your research library using AI, from free, more features via subscription.

Systematic Quantitative Literature Review

Performing a systematic quantitative literature review is often the first part of a PhD or research project. Ask colleagues for tips on performing a systematic literature review in a scientific domain. A Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) is a form of systematic quantitative literature review growing in popularity.

Low-Cost Open Access Journals for Paper Publishing

Many institutions and early career researchers cannot afford to pay a journal's high Article Processing Charges (APC). In some cases paying an APC allows for a paper to be published Open Access, therefore available for free to everyone. Open Access publishing is increasingly required for higher research ratings, as it is seen to be helping spread scientific knowledge, especially to impoverished countries.

This list of resources is mainly for STEM researchers looking for low-cost Open Access publishing routes. Warning Note: There are many publishing scams you may come across, especially when your first paper is available with your email address. Criminals set up fake journals and conferences to obtain money for registration and publishing fees and give nothing in return. Always check the reputation of the journal or conference.

Appearance in this list is not an endorsement, please satisfy yourself that the publication is of sufficient quality for your paper (see the section on Assessing for Research Impact).

Free Journal Network, promotes Journals under the Fair Open Access (FOA) principles, i.e., journals that are open access, scholarly run, and have low or free fees.
PeerJ provides low-cost Open Access publishing, including PeerJ for Computer Science.
Frontiers has many journals for Open Access publishing, with varying publishing charges.
Theory of Computing is an online Open Access journal "dedicated to free global dissemination of research in theoretical computer science".
The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics (E-JC) is a "fully-refereed electronic journal with very high standards, publishing papers of substantial content and interest in all branches of discrete mathematics, including combinatorics, graph theory, and algorithms for combinatorial problems". E-JC is free for authors and readers.
Ledger is a journal publishing research articles on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
If you present a good paper at an IARIA conference they will publish it in one of their freely available IARIA Journals.
MDPI publishes Open Access and will sometimes allow publishing without an APC.
Universal Wiser Publisher and Bon View Publishing are recent entrants in the Open Access publishing market.

Some wealthy institutions have programs available to help pay the APC. Research project funding may cover an APC. There are several considerations, MDPI AG has a useful page on Funding of APCs. If you cannot afford to pay the APC then try and find a sponsor who will (e.g. a company associated with the research project). The alternative is to publish without Open Access so that the journal recovers costs by charging for access to the article. See Inderscience as an example of an organisation that provides free publishing for restricted access or Open Access for an APC.

If you do not publish under Open Access at least ensure that the terms and conditions allow you to host a version of the paper in your University's online repository, or on a personal website or blog. Most publishers (e.g., see the IEEE Open site) now support this model as they realise that the movement to open up research to a larger audience needs this requirement. To help determine if a paper publisher supports Open Access policies the Jisc Sherpa services.

Warning: There are publishing organisations that do not adhere to high academic standards, make sure you avoid predatory open access publishing.

To help find a Journal to publish your research as Open Access try:

To learn more about Open Access:

open-access.net website
Science Europe have a document titled Principles on Open Access to Research Publications

To publish your work as an Open Access book take a look at Open Book Publishers or unglue.it.

Preprints - Not Always a Good Idea

Your published research must be peer-reviewed. This validates your research and ensures high standards of scientific practice. Your peers are your colleagues, your supervisors, conference and workshop panels, journal editors and reviewers, other researchers and scientists in your domain of research, and the wider scientific community. A preprint archival service will expose papers and scientific work before peer review and publication. The idea behind preprinting is to ensure the research results are checked, receive constructive criticism, and important science is disseminated quickly and widely (which was great during the COVID-19 pandemic). Plus, work is given priority over other results as authors are effectively registering their scientific contribution which is important in fast-moving fields. Further, preprinting supports Open Science initiatives. However, preprints need careful consideration as there are downsides. Some publication outlets are not friendly to preprinted papers. Paper content and data can be taken and reused by others in their work. Some low-quality science appears on preprint services and could taint your work. Indeed information overload and, as previously mentioned, the reproducibility of results is seen as a concern in the scientific community. Finally, do you want your work freely available, particularly if it may have potential commercial value (business idea, patent, or licensable copyright)?

Here is a list of preprint services, remember, preprint only if you have a definite need for it. A good preprint service will have some requirements to meet to stop spamming from low-quality contributions.

arXiv, the best-known long-standing preprint archival service for the major sciences.
bioRxiv, the preprint archival service for biology papers.
medRxiv, the health sciences preprint archival service.
TechRxiv, the technology archive is a preprint service for engineering and technology research.
Open Science Framework, the Center for Open Science has a preprint service.
SocArXiv, the social sciences preprint archival service is run by OSF.
viXra, an alternative preprint archival service (note it is arXiv spelt backwards).
ResearchGate, if you have a ResearchGate profile you can add preprints.

For more preprint services see the lists at Wikipedia and ASAPBio.

General Article Publishing

Your work may also benefit from writing general articles and blog posts. Also, try:

The Conversation
Here on Tek Eye

Don't forget, as previously mentioned, how easy it is to publish on a personal blog or website. If you do, ensure that the article meta-data is suitable for academic indexing according to the Google Scholar Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters.

Publicising Research, Networking and Collaborating

ORCiD - A persistent digital identifier for researchers.
X (previously Twitter) - Published something? Tweet (X) about it.
Bluesky - An alternative to X (Twitter).
Google Scholar, set up your Google Scholar profile.
ResearchGate, publish your science and collaborate.
SciProfiles, SciProfiles developed by MDPI is a social network for researchers and scholars.
Academia.edu, a platform for academics to share research papers.
Elsevier allows an author profile in Scopus.
Clarivate has the Web of Science service for researcher profiles.
Linkedin, the world's leading business networking social media site.
Stack Overflow or other Exchanges, answer questions to build up a score to display your knowledge.
Use the konfer service to find research collaboration partners.
UK researchers can engage with the UK Government through the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST).
Facebook, a popular walled social network.

Accessing Expensive Test Equipment and Facilities

Research can require using costly facilities and equipment not available within your institution. Accessing other equipment and facilities is another advantage of building up a network of research contacts. Your network may help overcome hurdles in finding facilities and equipment.

Other resources for facilities and equipment are available:

Need some industrial-grade equipment for your research? Try equipment.data to find facilities.
Technician-Led Equipment Sharing
konfer equipment resources

Assessing for Research Impact

Publish or Perish software by Harzing
Eigenfactor
The Journal Quality List at Harzing
Scimago Journal and Country Rank
CiteScore provided by Scopus: CiteScore is a simple way of measuring the citation impact of sources, such as journals.
Citation Analysis and Impact Factors by the University of British Columbia
Your institute may have access to Web of Science, inquire at your institute's library

Expanding Your Knowledge

MIT OpenCourseWare, need to brush up on a new knowledge area.
Khan Academy, another source of useful courses to expand your knowledge, e.g. improving English grammar or your knowledge of statistics.
Duolingo, learn another language.
Dodona, need to get up to speed with computer programming, try Dodona from Ghent University.
The Programming Historian has useful articles for non-programmers who need to process data with digital tools.
Wikibooks have free online books on various topics.